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Colour Sergeant Smoot, whose rank was the English equivalent of Johnson’s gunnery sergeant stripes, had served as a troop leader during Desert Storm and afterwards had been through the USMC Scout Sniper School at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, USA, a course Marcus had taught shortly before his deployment to Bosnia the previous year.

Smoot was thirty-eight years old and divorced with eighteen-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, who were just starting their first year of university studies. He had been in the Corps for twenty years already and was up for regimental sergeant major in the next selection phase. It was a promotion he half-hoped not to get, fearing it would only serve to give his ex-wife more money to waste on her boyfriends.

“She was a bit of a tart to begin with,” he said. “I should’ve seen it. I mean, she slept with me the very night we met. I got her preggers within the first month we were dating, and we were wed a week later, me on a Marine 1st Class bankroll. We were always broke and I was always gone off on this or that duty. Every time I was home, it was as if I was a nuisance, like I was interrupting something. It was fifteen years of pure marital hell with her. I do love my kids, though, and they love me—at least, they act like it. My son says he wants to be a Naval officer. Can you believe that? The son of a Marine sergeant, becoming a bloody admiral!”

Barclay smiled at his superior and said, “Well, Colours, thanks for the lesson. Watching you these past five years has blessed me with the foresight to not even try. I love‘em and leave‘em as needed, but always use protection…that’s the key, you see…leave no trace.” He grinned mischievously. “Didn’t they teach you that in sniper school?”

All three men laughed aloud and sipped their large, foam-topped glasses of thick, black Guinness.

“What about you, Marcus?” Smoot asked. “Any love life?”

“Almost, once.” His smile faded briefly, but he covered his immediate tension by taking another swig of his beer. When he put it down, there was a smile on his face again. “She said it was her or the Corps, and well…here I am.”

“Oorah!” Barclay replied. “That’s the way! Here’s to Marcus.
Semper
Fidelis
.”

Allison, the pub proprietor, walked across the mostly empty room to their table. “Well, Gunnery Sergeant Johnson,” she said with a stern look on her face, “it looks like you have quite a bill to take care of. How do you plan to pay, love?”

Allison was tall, nearly six feet. A slender athletic build accentuated her height. She had a narrow face that ended in a pointed nose and chin. Tight, small bundles of wrinkles graced the corners of her eyes. Her long, nut-brown hair was pulled back into a thickly woven braid that ran to below her shoulder blades.

Allison’s age was hard to tell. The life of a barmaid often ripened a person prematurely. Marcus’s best guess was that she was somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Whatever her age, she filled her blue jeans and T-shirt out very well, displaying the body of a woman who had taken fitness seriously since she was young. There were no rings on any of her long, slim fingers, which extended from smooth hands that seemed well cared-for.

Her lips were full, even youthful-looking. There were few lines or wrinkles at their edges. This led Marcus to believe that although the smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air of the pub, she was not a smoker herself. She probably inhaled enough smoke in her job every night to get a more-than-ample nicotine fix.

“Do you take VISA?” Marcus asked as he reached for his wallet.

She raised an eyebrow. A frown pulled down the edges of her lips. After a second of silence, she broke into a smile, which quickly grew into a laugh as she put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t you worry about it none, love—I was only playing with you. I heard you’d be here for a while yet, so I’ll just keep your tab running as long as you need. These jacks like to bully a fella into buying all their beer so they can save their shillings for their girlfriends.”

“Poker’s more like it.” Barclay laughed. “Those blokes ain’t got time for girls. We make sure of that, don’t we, Colours?”

“That’s right, Sergeant,” Smoot said. He rose from the table, stamping his hand on the hard wooden surface with a resounding thud. “Thanks again, Miss Allison. As usual, you were a most gracious hostess to me and my men. The company thanks you, the troop thanks you, and the Queen thanks you.” He bowed courteously as he uttered the last words.

“That niceness with the Yank about his tab doesn’t apply to you, Reggie,” she replied, one eyebrow cocked back up.

“Oh, come on now, Allie, my love, you know I pay up every month. Whatever the ex-wife’s lawyers let me keep back, that is.”

“I know you do, but I also have been getting a feeling that you boys may be shipping out again soon, and so I’m just letting you know you’ve nearly gotten to your five-hundred-quid limit.”

“As always,” Smoot said, his face blushing slightly, “you are truly oblique about your approach to dealing discreetly with your most trusted clients.”

“It’s the German in my blood. My grandfather was a tax collector.”

“Gestapo, you mean?” mumbled the colour sergeant.

“Say that with a smile, Marine,” she threatened jokingly.

“Payout is this Friday, tomorrow, I promise.”

“Thanks, Reggie.” She smiled.

“Five hundred quid?” Barclay questioned. “Hey, I want a tab like that!”

“You’ll have to wait until you grow up there, little Billie. Reggie’s been lining my purse for most of a decade now, so he gets special treatment. Not that you’ll blab that bit to the inspector general now, will you? Besides, he’s the one who came up with the now accepted ‘tradition’ of the new guy buying a round.”

“Oh, is that so?” Marcus shot an accusing glance at Smoot. “So you’re the one who just cost me two hundred and fifty pounds?”

“Oh, thanks again, Allie, my love. I’ll probably nae make it home in one piece now.”

Everyone laughed as they backed away and rose from the table to leave.

“Well, let’s head home then,” Barclay said, “We’ve got PT in the morning at oh-six-thirty. Johnson, you’ll be meeting our captain and the lieutenants at the session. We’ve also got a colours sergeant to frag on the way back to the base.”

“Don’t even try it, you young’ns. This old man’ll kill you with both hands tied behind my back, by the mighty blast of a Guinness fart from hell.” He paused for a moment, then added, “On second thought, I’d better put me hands in front. No need to burn me own flesh.”

They roared with laughter as they left the pub and made their way down the dimly lit street to the main gate.

1. Chapter 7
   

Fairbanks Northstar Borough

Public Safety Building

December 18th

02:12 Hours

Trooper Lonnie Wyatt sat in her tiny cubicle in the Public Safety building with her digital voice recorder on the desk. A white wire ran from the small device up to the earbuds inserted in her ears. She listened carefully as she wrote up the details of her interviews with Charlie Bannock and Linus Balsen, and of the findings at the substation, in her full report. Several times in the process, she had to rewind as her mind drifted on an ebb tide of near exhaustion. Once the typing was done, Lonnie printed out the pages and digital pictures she had snapped at the power substation on the office’s color laser printer, attached them to the paperwork, and put it all in an interoffice memo envelope.

A numb tiredness tingled in her cheeks. Her eyes felt puffy as she walked down the hall to Commander Stark’s office and slid the package under his door. She straightened and stretched her stiff back, sore from hours of driving. Lonnie looked forward to getting into her soft, warm bed for the sleep she so desperately needed.

She started back to her cubicle to log off the computer for the night. Before she took two steps, Marsha Klein, the third-shift dispatch supervisor, called out her name.

“Lonnie? Trooper Wyatt? I have some information Glenda said to pass on to you if it came across.”

Lonnie turned her sunken and darkly shadowed eyes up to see the heavyset forty-something dispatcher waddle quickly up to her. Marsha came to a stop, then inhaled deeply to catch her breath from the exertion.

“Yes, ma’am, what is it?” Lonnie asked.

“Glenda told me that if the whereabouts of a TVEC truck, number forty-eight, were discovered, to let you know.” Marsha gulped a lung full of air, and pushed her thick, black plastic-rimmed glasses up on her nose with her forefinger. “Well, FPD just found it about twenty minutes ago in the Alaska Fitness Club parking lot on South Cushman. They said a witness, the night manager of the place, saw two men get out of it and into a dark green or black Chevy Blazer, then head toward town. FPD has details on the second vehicle. Seems the witness owns one just like it and thought his was being stolen, until he saw the license plates. We have a good ID on the Blazer. FPD is following up with a warrant search right now.”

“Oh, God!” Lonnie’s eyes widened with concern. “Who’s the officer being sent out? We have to stop him until he gets good backup. These guys are potentially armed and dangerous.”

“Oh!” Marsha’s eyebrows raised quickly above her glasses. “Oh my! It’s Officer Beed. I’ll tell FPD dispatch to call him right away.”

Marsha ran down the hall as fast as her legs could carry her back to the dispatch console. She plugged her headset into the panel and radioed the city dispatcher before sitting down. Marsha spoke in the ubiquitously calm manner that good dispatchers always use on the radio. She told the voice on the other end to warn Officer Beed that the men he was going after were armed and dangerous and to wait for backup.

The city dispatcher, still housed in the old City Public Safety building two blocks away, pressed the radio key to the officer’s frequency.

Officer Jimmy Beed was a tall, thin, twenty-seven-year-old War on Terror veteran who became a cop after he returned from his second tour in Iraq three years earlier. Closely cut, red hair rimmed the bottom edge of the dark blue baseball cap he wore with the word POLICE in yellow embroidered lettering across the front.

Beed’s face was long and narrow, with an almost stretched appearance accentuated by high cheekbones, large ears that stuck far out from the sides of his head, and
bright
red eyebrows above hazel eyes. His defining feature was the very large Adam’s apple that jutted wildly from above the collar of his police uniform. This part of his anatomy often drew the attention of whomever he was talking to as it slid up and down whenever he swallowed or cleared his throat. In the Army, the thick bit of cartilage had earned him the nickname “Gollum”.

Beed stood on the landing of a modest rental house on Gradelle Avenue, on the west side of the city. The surrounding neighborhood was primarily full of family homes, but there were also numerous college students who rented houses in the conveniently located area. The University of Alaska Fairbanks was less than a mile away. Beed had graduated with the Class of ’98 from West Valley High School just down the road from the house. A previous tenant of the rental, many years ago, had been a good friend of his.

In the driveway stood a dark green Chevy Blazer that bore the license plate of the vehicle that had driven away from the Alaska Fitness Club.

The lights were on in the house as he approached, so he simply walked up to the door and knocked, expecting to find a couple of college students who had stolen the truck for a free joy ride. Inside, he could see the dancing lights of a television filtered through white window curtains. The sound of an audience laughing to a late-night comedy show floated through the window to his ears.

Beed again rapped his gloved knuckles on the door and waited for the answer. Footsteps approached and a moment later, the door opened. Just as the occupants of the house came into view, Beed was startled by the unexpected sound of a voice over his radio.

“Unit 739, dispatch.”

The man who stood inside the door raised an eyebrow and waved permission to Beed to take the call. He was a tall, dark-featured man with Eastern European features, in his late twenties or early thirties. His face carried an indifferent expression.

“739,” Beed replied into his handset.

“10-12, be advised of possible 10-99 Adem, 10-32. 10-69 en-route.”

As the coded message came across the radio, Beed instinctively pressed the talk button and said in a calm, almost robotic voice, “10-4, 10-37 on scene. 10-68.”

Another man, shorter with blond hair and lighter complexion, joined the first. The two stood in the doorway as they heard the encoded words of the dispatcher and politely waited for the officer to finish his reply to the voice on the other end.

Beed thought,
Great timing folks. The armed and dangerous suspects are standing right in front me. Hopefully that backup will arrive faster than the warning message did.

He let go of the transmitter button on the microphone and turned back to the two men. His expression revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Not wanting to make a scene that might spook them, he decided to go ahead and ask a couple of basic questions while waiting for the promised backup.

“Good evening, gentlemen.” He put his body in what is called by law enforcement trainers as “the interview position”. Body squarely set, feet shoulder-width apart, both hands in the center of the front of the body, fingertips touching, but not clasped. This position enabled an officer to quickly react to any multitude of attacks, as the hands were at center mass and could be quickly deployed in any direction to deflect a punch, grab a suspect, or reach for the ten-millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol that hung in the black leather holster on his hip.

“Sorry to disturb you so late, but it seems some folks witnessed two men getting out of a stolen pickup truck a little while ago, and then leaving in that Blazer parked in your driveway.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, officer,” said the tall one. Beed noted that the man had a strong accent.

He continued, “We have been home all day doing homework. We are university students. And tonight we’ve been watching TV.”